9th April 2010 Archive

A University of California professor who organized a "virtual sit-in" that targeted the university president's website has been told he may face criminal charges for mounting a distributed denial of service attack.

Apple's new SDK for the iPhone 4.0 OS bars developers from accessing the company's APIs through any sort of intermediary layer that translates applications written in ways Steve Jobs doesn't approve of.

Cisco Systems did more than launch two new servers earlier this week. It also rejiggered some of the networking gear used in conjunction with its Unified Computing System wares and talked a bit about its customers.

Mozilla has released a public beta of Firefox "Lorentz," a test version of Firefox 3.6 designed to minimize crashes by running Flash, Silverlight, Java, and other plug-ins as processes separate from the core browser.

You've taken delivery of your shiny new Android handset, you've logged into the Googleverse and now you're thinking 'what next?'. Well, you can start by downloading the following ten apps that will help you get the most from your handset. Whether you want to read, write, chat, work, travel, watch some TV or just to keep your handset in tip-top form there is an app for that.

If readers want to examine an interesting example of how to manage a data loss, have a look at what happened at the London Borough of Barnet. A data loss involving 9,000 children followed a burglary of the home of a member of staff. The loss included the council’s computer equipment (a laptop), CD Roms and memory sticks, along with other items from the house.

April 1, 2010 was a not classic All Fools' day in the UK press, although The Register did pull off a few half-decent pranks itself, including news of an alien invasion through the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. Now that the April Fools' jokes have been exposed it should be safe to confirm something that wasn't one - the "Carbon Reduction Commitment To Energy Efficiency Scheme", which is now in force in the UK.

Quadrupling the transmission power of 3G networks will lead to famine, mass starvation and scurvy for all, not to mention annoying cameramen and the MoD, if the hysterical response to Ofcom's new proposals is to be believed.

eBay does not infringe jewellery shop Tiffany's trade marks when counterfeits are sold by sellers at the online auction site. Tiffany has lost its appeal in the US against the same decision as made by a lower court.

To picturesque Wapping, where unrest among hacks and techies about recent IT cuts at News International is bubbling following a 24-hour email outage yesterday that crippled newsrooms and commercial operations alike.

There are a couple of major pivot points for activity within the IT landscape. The first is the mainframe - that beast sitting in the data centre doing all the really important grown up processing and data management - which demands respect and needs to be constantly fed with budget and attended to by the high priests of that domain. The second is the ERP system, as the centre for all bean-counting and the enabler of so much operational activity within the business. With its tentacles extending into every part of the organisation, it sometimes seems as if everything else in IT needs to integrate with it to one degree or another.

Not so long ago, a TV was just something for presenting broadcast programmes or content from devices like DVD players. If you wanted anything more exotic, you had to hook up a media player or perhaps a PC. More and more sets sprouted DVI or VGA ports to make that easier.

Mission specialists Clayton Anderson and Rick Mastracchio (seen below) earlier today ventured outside the International Space Station on the first of three planned spacewalks for space shuttle Discovery's STS-131 mission.

A Tory government would cut spending on public sector IT projects, office costs, contracts and hiring of new staff in an effort to hold back £12bn and swerve a rise in National Insurance contributions.

For anyone who has been in IT for a while, all that new and improved stuff can quite quickly feel like the same-old-same-old, repackaged for the latest generation of supposedly tech-literate masses. Still, the “I’ve seen it all before” game can be a dangerous one to play.

A new bribery law has been passed by the Houses of Commons and Lords but is not yet in force. The Bribery Act can penalise companies whose employees engage in bribery if the company did not have adequate policies in place to prevent it.

Update: This story has been updated to show that Larry Sanger now says that the images in question do not depict real people and to include additional legal clarification. And it was later updated a second time with additional clarification about federal law 18USC 2258A, which requires electronic service providers to notify the NCMEC if they are made aware of child pronography.

Either you just bought an iPad and you wallet is now depleted, you're thinking of buying one and you'd like to know how you can stuff it with apps for zero dollars, or you're simply curious about how free iPad apps compare with free iPhone apps.